M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
3. Victorinus, a man of entire affection, gentleness, sincerity, and blamelessness,[1] a man, further, conspicuous for the noblest accomplishments to be thus afflicted by his son's most untimely death, was this in any sense just or fair? If Providence does govern the world, was this too rightly provided? If all human things are determined by Destiny, ought this to have been determined by Destiny? Shall there, then, be no distinction of fortunes between the good and the bad? Have the Gods, have the Destinies no power of discrimination as to what sort of man shall be robbed of his son? Some thoroughly vicious and abandoned wretch, who had far better himself never been born, rears his children safely and leaves them at his death to survive him.[2] Victorinus, a blameless man, is bereaved of his darling son, and yet it would have been in the highest interests of the state that as many as possible of his kind should be born. Why Providence—out upon it!—if it provides unfairly? The Destinies, they say, are called so from the word "to destine": is this to destine rightly? Now the poets assign to the Destinies distaris and threads. Surely no spinner would be so perverse and unskilful as to spin for her master's toga a heavy and knotty yarn, but for a slave's dress a fine and delicate one. For good men to be stricken with sorrow while the bad enjoy every domestic felicity—such a spinning performance by the Destinies I hold to be neither by weight nor rate.[3]
4. Unless maybe quite another error throws us
- ↑ See Dio, lxxii. II.
- ↑ cp. Psalms, xvii. 14.
- ↑ Lit. task weighed or measured. It would almost do to translate it "neither in rhyme nor reason."
